Saturday, November 30, 2013

#46 Ants

As a result of my studies, I have come to believe that every plant, animal, insect, and fish are proofs for God in and of themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of such proofs everywhere you look for “he who has eyes to see and ears to hear.”Pick any one that you like and research it extensively. You can go on and on and on being more and more astounded. Each is so marvelous that the only possible conclusion, if you are willing to accept it, is that it was designed by a super intelligent source.

Let’s talk about ants for a while…tiny creatures with a brain no bigger than a pinhead. There are over 12,500 cataloged species of ants, with estimates of perhaps 22,000 in existence.[1] Evolutionists have their creation story for how all these different ants came into being. The story always starts with knowing the conclusion and figuring out the path of how blind and accidental processes might have arrived at that end. It’s pure fiction. When you analyze each supposed step with logical questions, you’ll have to believe in miracles to accept that it could really have happened.There isn’t any real proof that can be observed, so in the end you have to decide what story you are going to believe in. Did all of these astounding capabilities of ants just come about accidentally? Or is there a God behind it? Either way, you are a still just a believer. There is only faith.Here is a quote that shows what I mean. In the considered opinion of biologist Jochen Zeil of the Australian National University“I think that every animal we look at [including the ant] is a more competent, more robust, more flexible, more miniaturized and a more energy-, material-, sensor-, and computation-efficient agent than anything we have ever built.” [2]I would agree with him, but his conclusion is different than mine. He thinks that it all happened by accident and he chooses to believe in evolution. His faith is that there was no invisible God behind it. Ants are everywhere in the world. Have you ever taken the time to watch them? Probably you studied them in school somewhere and you were very impressed at what they can do. A functioning colony of ants may contain millions and millions of ants and some colonies may be as big as a house. Scientists have poured cement into ant colonies and then dug them out to see what they look like (see pictures below).

How big in size is an ant brain do you think? But amazing things are going on inside there. Researchers have concluded they are doing math as complicated as the programmers who built the Internet so that billions of tiny packets of information run smoothly along channels and through nodes and switches to get to their final destinations. Here is a quote about ant math and food supplies: “The algorithm relates at least three critical variables: the rate of outgoing foragers, the amount that the rate increases with each returning ant, and the amount that the rate decreases with each outgoing ant. Researchers discovered that this ant algorithm closely matches the one that programmers wrote to regulate Internet traffic. The algorithm uses two formulae:

[3]

Here is another type of math. Researchers Chris Reid and Associate Professor Madeleine Beekman experimented with ants and changeable mazes.[4] They discovered that ants can adapt well enough to create an optimal solution to a maze, something few computer programs can do.This was called the “towers of Hanoi” puzzle. [5] “The game involves transferring disks of tapering size from one of three stacks to another without placing a larger disk on top of a smaller one. For the ants, though, researchers transposed the different stacking options onto a maze of hexagons, where the shortest route to food corresponded to the best solution to the puzzle. Of course, the ants solved it. They even reworked new solutions to overcome blocked tunnels. In addition, the pioneer ants that solved the puzzles somehow explained the correct route to their relatives.”[6]

Ant colonies of necessity have incredible systems to function as they do with effectiveness and efficiency. All the food coming in and being stored and used up needs to be accounted for, measured constantly, and maintained. There are systems for heating and cooling the food, systems for disposal of wastes, systems for hygiene and disposal of dead ants, systems for caring for eggs and the newborn, systems for protection and survival in case of floods or invasions. Here is a simplified diagram to illustrate the point above:

(See diagram above) “An ant colony has several entrances (A), leading to a variety of subterranean chambers. Each chamber has a specific use. Some are for food storage (B). The queen has her own room (D). In another chamber workers tend unhatched eggs (C). A deeper room serves as a nursery for larvae and cocoons (F). In the replete gallery (G) are the worker ants whose expanded abdomens contain surplus food for the colony. In another room (E), worker ants are digging a new chamber.”[7]Scientists believe ants have a sophisticated guidance system like GPS and also that they are able to count and remember how many steps they have taken away from the nest so that they can return. They can also communicate through a number of different chemical signals to other ants.“Distances travelled are measured using an internal pedometer that keeps count of the steps taken and also by evaluating the movement of objects in their visual field (optical flow). Directions are measured using the position of the sun. They integrate this information to find the shortest route back to their nest. Like all ants, they can also make use of visual landmarks when available as well as olfactory and tactile cues to navigate. Some species of ant are able to use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation. The compound eyes of ants have specialized cells that detect polarized light from the Sun, which is used to determine direction. These polarization detectors are sensitive in the ultraviolet region of the light spectrum.”[8]Just think about how complicated the ant eye mechanism must be to accomplish what it does. Please read about The Eye in my previous proof for God. But the ant uses other really complicated systems as well like smell and touch and muscles all integrated into their tiny brains. Ants have been observed to be moving in pairs where one seems to be teaching the other one. I think one should conclude that they are passing on information which strongly indicates intelligence rather than accidental origins.Evolution hypothesizes that the process of natural selection is at work. This normally involves a male and a female parent. Ant mating and reproduction can be very different from that. Here is a statement from Wikipedia: “A wide range of reproductive strategies have been noted in ant species. Females of many species are known to be capable of reproducing asexually through thelytokous parthenogenesis and one species, Mycocepurus smithii, is known to be all-female.”[9]Also another statement from Wikipedia showing more issues for evolutionists:“The life of an ant starts from an egg. If the egg is fertilized, the progeny will be female (diploid); if not, it will be male (haploid). Ants develop by complete metamorphosis with the larva stages passing through a pupal stage before emerging as an adult. The larva is largely immobile and is fed and cared for byworkers.”[10]If males are “haploid” it means they only have 1 set of chromosomes, not two to offer for Natural Selection to work. Secondly, metamorphosis could never be a process that could have resulted from evolution (see my blog article on that). Thirdly, asexual reproduction also does not offer a chance for Natural Selection to function. Each colony has several different types of ants within the same species, e.g. workers/drones, soldiers, queen, and males. Evolution cannot account for how they accidentally came to exist and then could continue to be produced by the observable ways they are. Typically the food they receive or chemicals around them determine what type of ant they become. Scientists don’t really know that much about this subject.Some ants in a colony can fly, but others cannot. How can that be explained adequately by accidents?

Various ant species build amazing things besides nests. Some make bridges and some can make rafts. Tell me no intelligence was involved in an elaborate construction, it was all by accident, and then let me smile condescendingly. “Solenopsis invicta, a common species of fire ant, originates from the rain forests of Brazil, where heavy precipitation can cause flooding to occur up to twice daily. In order to stick together as a colony during these deluges, the fire ants hook their legs and mouths together to create a living, breathing waterproof material that floats for hours, or even weeks, if necessary, until floods subside.”[11]In conclusion, there are thousands of different species of ants with incredibly complex systems of organization on a massive scale. It takes a lot of faith in chance and denial of intelligence to believe all this evolved by chance. Let me also remind you that there are over 20,000 known species of bees, 100,000 species of wasps, and 4,000 species of termites. All of these live in highly developed colonies as well. There must be God.________________________________________1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant2. Gross, M. 2012. How ants find their way. Current Biology. 22 (16): R618.3. Prabhakar, B., K. N. Dektar, and D. M. Gordon. 2012. The Regulation of Ant Colony Foraging Activity without Spatial Information. PLoS Computational Biology. 8 (8): e1002670.4. News story: http://sydney.edu.au/news/sobs/1699.html?newsstoryid=6164 The result was exactly as predicted: the ants quickly established pheromone trails along the shortest path. But then we blocked the shortest paths, thus forcing the ants to find an alternative solution. As explained above, conventional wisdom dictates that the ants would not be able to adapt and would continue following their original trail that now leads nowhere.Contrary to predictions, Argentine ants rapidly found the alternative shortest path, showing that they have the ability to adapt to sudden changes in their environment. But the speed with which they adapt depends on whether or not they had prior experience with the maze: colonies that had explored the maze hours before food was introduced, found the alternative solution quicker than colonies without such pre-exposure. This is a puzzling result, as the time between exploring the maze and the need to find an alternative solution when the original path is blocked, was at least 1 hour.5. Reid, C. R., D. J. T. Sumpter and M. Beekman. 2011. Optimisation in a natural system: Argentine ants solve the Towers of Hanoi. Journal of Experimental Biology. 214 (1): 50-58.6. Insect Arithmetic--Pure Genius! by Frank Sherwin, M.A., & Brian Thomas, M.S. http://www.icr.org/article/7536/7. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-144467/An-ant-colony-has-several-entrances-leading-to-a-variety8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant 11. http://www.nbcnews.com/science/bizarre-fire-ants-lock-together-form-big-rafts-survive-floods-2D11660482

About Me

Welcome to 101 Proofs For God for the "common man" This Blog was inspired by a prayer where I asked God how I could help Him and experienced a deeply lonely heart for His children. Hopefully my inspirations might tweak your thinking about the things all around you in this world.
Each proof should be just short enough for a 1 to 2 minute read.
May God bless you immensely and may you draw closer to Him every day. - Jim Stephens